


two winters on, the common hollyhock

by asynchrony



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Hanahaki Disease, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Post-Timeskip, so the timeline is definitely hazy but so is the fic in general, the author has only read up to halfway through nationals as of publication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:08:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26911159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asynchrony/pseuds/asynchrony
Summary: Oikawa develops Hanahaki for someone who is not his husband, and Iwaizumi plummets through every stage of grief and love, and love, and love.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru, Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru/Ushijima Wakatoshi, Iwaizumi Hajime/Ushijima Wakatoshi, Oikawa Tooru/Ushijima Wakatoshi
Comments: 10
Kudos: 86
Collections: Haikyuu Angst Week 2020





	two winters on, the common hollyhock

**Author's Note:**

> the soundtrack for this fic is just _[woke up new](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ-wI0xhges)_ by the mountain goats, on loop.

### denial

Screens don't flicker red-blue-green like they used to, but Tōru's image is marred by static anyway. Hajime props his head on the solid root of his palm and observes.

"I've been watching his matches, you know. He's less frustrating now that he's not my rival."

Amusement tugs at Hajime's lips. "Kageyama or Ushijima?" He waits for the annoyance to come, but Tōru is quiet.

A breath, two.

"I don't just watch the matches Kageyama's also in. Not only those, not any more."

Not only a rival, not any more. The seeds of something are germinating and Hajime is afraid to ask what.

Have you been watching me, he cannot ask, because he hasn't done anything worth watching.

"Let's get married," he says instead, "when you come up to visit me."

"Is that what you call a proposal?"

"I suppose." His heart pounds in his chest for all the wrong reasons, no velvet boxes from jacket pockets. Sore knees but not from falling for him. "It's legal here, you know. So we should."

"So we should."

* * *

Many months later, he gets a call from a familiar country code and an unfamiliar number. Picks up, heart in his throat.

"Is this Hajime Iwaizumi," the tinny voice asks. Falters over his name, even stacked the wrong way around. Everything is upside down anyway. "Yes," Hajime says, and waits.

"You are Tōru Oikawa's next of kin, as you might know," the caller begins, and it only goes downhill from there. No, he did not know. Had somehow assumed it would be his mother, if it were to be someone so far away. A teammate. His captain. Who knows, but here he is, here he is, here he is, first-name last-name boxes roman-lettered in Tōru's fastidious handwriting on hospital forms that have summoned him like some blood ritual gone very, very wrong.

"May I ask what your relation to him is? Our paperwork didn't say."

"I'm his husband. I'm his husband." Fits his mouth clumsily around the alien word. How strange that it means forever but cannot capture everything he is to him.

"Oh." More silence. A breath, two, three. Four. Papers rustling to stall some inevitable tragedy. "Your husband has been diagnosed with Hanahaki. Are you familiar with it?"

Your husband, Hajime realizes. Your husband is dying of unrequited love. For a moment of freefall he wonders if it is a sign that he has never loved Tōru how he deserves to be loved, as he has often feared. Then he hits terminal velocity and realizes it might be the opposite. Oh. He has never been enough, has he. Not for one as hungry as Tōru.

"I am." Hajime relaxes each finger's grip on his phone with the precision that his studies have taught him. "How far along is he?"

* * *

### anger

Tōru refuses to get the surgery.

"It'll put me out of action for at least a season. And besides... you know. What people become. It's not just one love I'll lose."

Hajime hears this, and wonders if he's unwilling to lose him, or volleyball, or himself.

* * *

A drunken night finds him at Ushijima's door. He knocks. Waits, again, interminable seconds while the love of his life struggles to breathe. He has always been waiting, perhaps not for this.

"Please," he says to nobody. The man opening the door is a solid mass backlit by flickering dormitory incandescence.

"Please." He is aware of how absurd this is. Aircraft grade titanium on his finger cool and unyielding like handcuffs, chosen for its representation of their distance. Only a flight or two away, and yet. The words dry up in his throat.

Please, he rehearses. He is dying. It is absurd. In the breadth of six years and no contact and your spikes becoming even more powerful (not at him not for him not with him) he has fallen in love with your silhouette. With the way you narrow your eyes to just the ball and rise to its challenge. You offered him that, years ago, and he turned it down, and he chose me instead, but now he — my husband, not in this country but in another, my husband, my soulmate — he wants you, he wants that, he wants it so badly it is unmaking him it is undoing me.

"Do you still want Oikawa to set to you," Hajime says instead to the broad chest of a man he grew up hating and can now destroy.

Thinks about digging fingers into Achilles tendons. How quick it would be to snap his collarbones while he lay pliant and trusting on the massage table, fragments of bone drifting through sinew and heart and heartache. How easy it would be to say it was revenge for an overuse injury years ago, spite carried for his beloved so long that Tōru himself has forgotten what it was to feel it. Hajime wonders how long it has been that he himself has forgotten how to feel anything else.

"Yes," Ushijima replies, honest and sure, and Hajime runs before his hands can do anything that will kill anyone who isn't already dying.

* * *

Tōru has softened over the years. Edges worn down like South American sea glass washing up washing down washing away. But the pain has made him sharp again, broken him in new places.

"How dare you," he spits. "I didn't choose this didn't choose my body betraying me again again again again I chose you, Hajime, I chose volleyball, I chose to play at the fucking Olympics." Stops to breathe, once, twice. Quietly, "I'm not sure I will have that after all."

"You will see him." Hajime realizes. "At the Olympics. You will see him."

Oikawa is silent-not-silent on the line, coughing up a thousand pale pink secrets.

"Yes," he says. "I will see him. I will see you. You've seen him already." You have already seen him, you have already seen him, you have already known me, he doesn't say. You know. You know I won't make it.

You will, Hajime thinks. Whatever I have to do so you can live. A promise from childhood turned into a curse.

* * *

### bargaining

"I love you," Tōru says.

I love you too, Hajime doesn't say. I know, Hajime doesn't say. Years of study and he knows now that there is no such thing as a funny bone.

"Come home," Hajime says.

Tōru sob-laughs. "I can't. Lack of proximity is what's keeping me alive, the doctors say." Distance from him distance from you distance from blooming. Hajime hears him wheeze, doesn't see him, hasn't been allowed to watch him even on his screen in so, so long. Eight seconds of sightless tension, before he speaks again. "I'm sorry."

Well. There is only one way Hajime can make this right.

* * *

Actually, it is Ushijima who approaches him first. One day he catches the wing spiker watching him with the intensity he only devotes to his sport and his setters and his would-be setters and he thinks, oh. I think I see, now, what Tōru sees in him.

"Iwaizumi-san," he opens.

Hajime is so very tired, worn down to the bone, his hands unreal on the bench at his sides.

"Please," he says. An olive branch plucked from his own skin. "Call me Hajime."

For some reason that is what widens Ushijima's eyes, never mind that Hajime asked him one question in the night before fleeing. Makes him look for all the world like the child neither of them had seen in him, when he was. A man constructed for sheer power shifting like he should be afraid of the smallest of tremors beneath his feet.

"Wakatoshi, then," he decides. "Hajime-san. Does he want to set to me."

Hajime is tired of euphemisms. "Oikawa has Hanahaki." A breath, two. "Do you love him?"

Wakatoshi quakes with realization. Pulls himself back together the way Hajime has watched him do a thousand times, winding up to serve. He does not ask any of the questions Hajime cannot answer, the _why_ and _how_ and _isn't he yours_.

"I don't know," he says. "I think I did, once, but from afar. The idea of him. Certainly not enough to take ill with it."

They are quiet for a moment, watching each other. Two, three breaths, four seconds. Wakatoshi sinks to the floor with the grace of a feline predator. Crosses his legs, tilts his face up like he is ready to germinate and Hajime is the winter's end sun.

"What are you going to do," he asks. Hushed like a prayer.

"This," Hajime says. "This."

Wakatoshi settles a broad, warm hand on his right knee. A mirror of things that have gone and things to come.

* * *

Hajime should have known that Wakatoshi, given any problem to solve, would approach it with everything a human body can possibly handle. Tōru, after all, was always the same. It was probably why he fell, so inexplicably, for a man he hadn't seen in years. It is definitely why he is incandescent even through the phone line with rage, now.

"Ushijima tried to call me. Tell me you didn't."

Oh. "I didn't give him your phone number. I promise."

"Do you promise you didn't tell him about this."

One, two breaths. They both know the answer.

"Hajime," Tōru says. He hasn't called him anything else since the hospital call.

"I'm sorry. I can talk to Wakatoshi if you—"

"Oh, he's Wakatoshi now."

"We work together." Hajime spreads his palms in supplication, a little helplessly. Tōru cannot see it.

"You hated him. You hate him. You still hate him," he says.

"I do," Hajime says, and only tastes the lie after his tongue has already formed the plosive and set it free.

* * *

### depression

Wakatoshi and Hajime fall into some sort of rhythm. To an extent, it would have happened anyway: as everyone prepares for the Olympics, phone calls bisected by timezones grow fewer in number and farther apart. Lunches together, nutritionally optimized, grow frequent.

"Is he still hanging up on you," Hajime asks.

Wakatoshi shrugs around a mouthful. The tendons in his neck strain with his premature swallow. "He blocked Kageyama for giving me his number. But he answers me."

Hajime has a thousand questions. Thinks of Wakatoshi's deliberate, careful reticence and wishes he could offer him the same respect. "Do you talk often? It's been so busy." In another world, he has filled his cell with tally marks for the days-hours-minutes since he has seen Tōru.

"I try," Wakatoshi says, and turns back to his food.

Hajime is starving, but he cannot eat. His grip flexes on his chopsticks. They clatter together in a tiny, reproachful cacophony.

Wakatoshi sets down his chopsticks. He takes Hajime's hand, gentle as can be, releasing Hajime's from his grip and laying them down. Two parallel lines, a pair, never too far apart.

"I don't know if I'm making any progress," he confesses. "I don't know what progress is, or what I want. I don't know what _you_ want, or how much you know. But—"

"But we're trying," Hajime finishes, hoarse with the thought. "We're trying to keep him alive."

"I want to see him at the Olympics," Wakatoshi murmurs, quiet enough Hajime has to lean in a little to hear him. "I want him happy. I don't know if that's enough."

There is a vice in Hajime's chest. Wakatoshi's eyes are soft and fixed on him. "Have you told him any of that," he asks despite himself.

Wakatoshi exhales, long and slow, all the control of an athlete with no famine in his heart or flowers in his lungs. "I'll keep calling until he lets me."

* * *

In the middle of afternoon training, three distinctive buzzes Hajime has known for a decade. Before he remembers himself he's snatched up his phone and fled to privacy.

"What's wrong," he opens. They have not shared a coast in some time, a bed in much longer. The mathematics of twelve hours is flipping ante- to post-, positive and negative poles, 2AM on the other end of satellites and the tilt of the earth's axis.

A sob. Two. Three, before Hajime gives in and lets the dam inside him burst, too. Tinny wailing, too raspy to be kept quiet even in the sacred stillness of the early morning, pressed to his ear; his own tears running past his phone like a fraction of a caress, tending toward infinity.

"Hajime, it hurts."

"I know. I know."

"It hurts."

"It does."

Twenty-seven shared hitched breaths, then the door clicks quietly open, and shut. Eight hesitant steps before Wakatoshi folds to his knees across from him.

"I said you've been having a family emergency." His voice is barely a low rumble at this volume, his stoic face shuddering through something which looks too much like fear to sit right on him. Hajime recognizes the devastation of the hunger that's been gnawing at him in Wakatoshi's eyes.

He takes a leap. "Tōru. Will it make it worse, if."

Tōru hiccups. "Is he there? Where are you?"

"In the locker room, just the two of us. He covered for me."

"Still the same stupid Iwa-chan, acting before thinking." There's a lilt to Tōru's voice and Hajime can't tell under the compression and sudden breathlessness if it's teasing or thorns. "Put me on speakerphone, then."

Hajime does. Places his phone flat between them like a treaty.

"Ushiwaka," Tōru says, then audibly crumples. "I'm sorry. To both of you. I've been so difficult." He's gasping, the sound static-laden but too wet not to still be tears. He hopes it's just tears.

Wakatoshi is still on his knees, a frozen tableau of shock and undisguised longing, melting all at once into the kind of focus that still makes Hajime shiver after watching him for weeks on end. Something he sees on Hajime's face seems to bolster his resolve.

"We miss you," Wakatoshi says. "You are difficult only because you are suffering. You are worth it."

"I was difficult back then, too."

"You were," Wakatoshi agrees, and Hajime snorts quietly. "But. I was wrong, I think. You wouldn't have been happy at Shiratorizawa." He meets Hajime's eyes. "And you were loved, difficult as you might have been."

"You _are_ loved," Hajime says. His jaw strains around the knot in his throat. "So much, Tōru, so much."

"There is nothing I want more than to be able to play against you again," Wakatoshi says, and Hajime knows him well enough now to know that this is a confession. Knows Tōru well enough to know that he'll know it, too. The knot tightens.

A shout from outside. "I'm needed, I think," Wakatoshi says. "It was nice to hear your voice." Then, in an undertone, "Take care of him."

"I always do," Hajime whispers, and the plosive is a lie from its formation. The door swings shut, and it's him and Tōru alone in a locker room that belongs to neither of them, too much red and chrome and none of the dents and scratches of adolescence, when love was easy and hate easier still.

Hajime leaves Tōru on speakerphone anyway, for the sentiment of it. Faces the wall and imagines his partner's pale back behind him, and talks about nothing at all.

When he emerges, eyes red-rimmed and swollen, the coach all but insists he takes the rest of the day off. Wakatoshi nods at him across the room without moving out of position, a flicker of a smile that leaves him unsettled all day.

* * *

### acceptance

Wakatoshi nearly breaks his door down a few weeks later, at their own 2AM.

Hajime is liquid with panic as he flips the latch. Wakatoshi shoulders his way in with the obtuse force he hasn't employed in nearly a decade.

"What did he send you," he asks urgently. Softens, slows like the arc of a high set. "Sorry. I'm not making any sense. Check your phone?"

They've both received exactly one message from Tōru. _See you in Tokyo_.

Hajime stares at his messaging app until his screen turns off. "Well."

"I should have guessed," Wakatoshi murmurs. Straightens, where tension has pulled his shoulders into the logarithmic arc of a nautilus shell. "Either way. I should not have woken you up for this. I apologize."

"No, it's all right. I would have..." Would have what, exactly? Seen the flashing sky-blue notification he's keyed just to Tōru at some point, probably, and spent a sleepless night alone. Or woken to it, and then, and then.

How funny, Hajime thinks, to be trapped in Tōru's orbit, and pull in another unsuspecting celestial body. To circle one so distant he may as well be unknowable, and keep each other much closer.

"Sit," Hajime says instead. "I'll make some tea."

It is too late for peace offerings, but Wakatoshi accepts it anyway. Folds his hands into his lap, lashes downcast and demure, posture upright without being rigid. Rumpled and dark-eyed in Hajime's quarters with the shell-shocked drowse of the hours before dawn. He is close enough to touch.

Hajime turns away instead, puts the kettle on to boil.

"You have been far too kind to me," he murmurs to the sink.

Behind him, the sound of an exhale which might be a smile. "Not as much as you deserve."

The whining roil of the kettle silences them both. No loose-leaf tea, no traditional pottery. Silvery mesh bags in two discolored melamine mugs. Hajime pours, pours, carries. Settles across from his guest, two spartan aluminium chairs made to take an athlete's weight, but not comfortably.

Wakatoshi nods his thanks. "You know. In high school, nights like this, my friends would sneak out of the dormitories and to the vending machines. Tendō used to say there was nothing quite so sweet as forbidden dessert." He looks wistful, gaze distant through Hajime's window.

"Are you hungry, then?"

"Not enough to want to break my schedule. You know how it is."

"I do." Then, as always, circling back around. "Do you think he's okay?"

"He must have gotten the green light to come, at least, if not to play. I hope that means all is well. But." A smile, rueful and achingly sincere. "I have always found him difficult to understand. You know him far better than I do."

Hajime cups his hands around his mug, both thumbs through the handle. "I think," he begins. "He's proud, and incredibly strong." They both know this. "He hasn't video called in a while, or told me much. I heard about his illness when the hospital called me." He swallows. Wakatoshi's eyes flicker from his ring back to his face with sympathetic horror. "He's always had a bad habit of keeping the things that scare him most from the people he loves."

"He wants to be perfect, even with you?"

"Not perfection, not at all. He doesn't want to burden me. He hates that he's burdened me. That's not the part I mind. I just wish—" He just wishes, a thousand different desires he is too afraid to speak into existence, a hundred petty thoughts he knows better than to mention. Guilt lances through him whenever he misses the Tōru he used to have, who spoke only languages he could understand. Who carried the same passport.

"Our lives are already far from domestic," he concludes. "But we'd found our own way. I think it upset him, to have no control over what this would do."

"You will find it again." Wakatoshi sounds sure as ever. Not for the first time Hajime pictures his distress as breaking waves against his stalwart cliffs. He has to ask.

"With you?"

Quiet. Two, three breaths.

"All he needed from me was for me to say I wanted to see him again, in the end. He doesn't— I don't have to want anything else."

"You're allowed to want, you know." Hajime's voice comes out low and kind enough to surprise himself.

He watches Wakatoshi pull himself together, an assemblage long-familiar. "There is nothing I want more," Wakatoshi says again. "Than to keep what I already have."

Hajime watches Wakatoshi watch him. Thinks about watching them both, in weeks to come, attention narrowed to each other as opponents once again. He'll be on the sidelines. Courtside, if he's lucky; the stands, if he's not. Thinks about waiting at the train station for the airport transfer, too many years ago. Thinks about waiting for the future to arrive.

"Okay," Hajime says. The knot in his throat releases, blossoms. "Okay."

**Author's Note:**

> the common hollyhock ( _alcea rosea_ ) is a biennial plant. it endures two frosts before it will flower: at the end of the first winter, it germinates if it can feel the warmth of the sun; at the end of the second, it is heart-shaped leaves without buds. it is after the third that its flowers finally bloom.
> 
> its flowers are referred to as 葵 (aoi) in japan, and represent ambition in victorian floriography.
> 
> * * *
> 
> i can't believe this is my second hq hanahaki fic, and both of them are from so far outside the hanahaki relationship that it's barely visible. [_cast-iron confessions_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25953430) is much more straightforward, if you're interested in pre-timeskip aofuta from moniwa's perspective.
> 
> as always, let me know what you think, here or on twitter (where this fic's graphic is [here](https://twitter.com/emdashing/status/1315234064211664896?s=19)).


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